4. Sir Edward Coke and the Star Chamber: the prosecution of rapes at Snargate, 1598–1602*

Louis A. Knafla

The Attorney General v Harwood et al. was unusual in that rape cases were seldom prosecuted in the early modern era.¹ It was also unusual in that Sir Edward Coke decided to take it on and then, after a lengthy intermission, put all his weight behind the prosecution in Star Chamber. The assaults at the core of the case involved several women caught in a series of brutal attacks that lasted well into the night of 6 October 1598, in the victualling house of John Grigsby in the Romney Marsh village of Snargate, Kent. After drinking for some time, seven yeomen became disordered, prompting neighbours to summon the village constable and minister. They entered the house and asked the men either to leave or keep better order. Nonetheless, the disorder continued and led to more violence throughout the evening. By the end of the night the men had assaulted Joan Grigsby, wife of the house, and her maidservants Elizabeth Crouchman, Agnes Horn and Mary Gamby. Local authorities had refused to prosecute the men who were accused of the atrocities, but eventually Coke stepped in.

It is difficult to understand why Coke, already an icon of the common law, decided to put so much effort into this cause from one of the most quiet and forlorn areas in the kingdom. Evidence reveals that it was two godly ministers who attained his confidence and persuaded the women, along with numerous local people of non-gentle status, to give testimony. The men charged with the offences had as their attorneys two prominent local landowners, lawyers and justices of the peace (JPs), Matthew Hadd and Robert Edolph. Coke, however, became relentless in his search for information as the men at first fled into France and elsewhere. His pursuit eventually won him the verdict he sought: the three chief perpetrators were fined the financially crippling sums of £200 each, and three lesser ones £40 each. The case reveals an interesting side of the attorney general as well as an unusual insight into the prosecution of sexual offences in the Star Chamber.

Because so many of the region’s disputes were resolved by arbitration, and because its world was largely beyond the purview of the central courts, it is by accident – as with Carlos Ginzberg’s miller – that we find an entry point into the lives of Kent’s marsh society.² The point is a series of case files in the Star Chamber records for the reign of Elizabeth I (STAC 5), which comprise a crown prosecution by the future chief justice of England of seven men of Romney Marsh plus a JP. The case is exceptional for several reasons. Coke generally focused on civil matters at common law in search of unravelling their legal intricacies. He also typically kept his efforts to great matters of state, involving conspirators such as Dr Lopez, the earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh and the perpetrators of the Gunpowder Plot. Thus, it is unusual to find him bringing a bill of complaint on 1 May 1600 against six yeomen of Romney Marsh and another of Sussex for alleged rapes which took place nineteen months earlier, privileging the allegations made by the maidservant Agnes Horn.

The attorney general’s action against John Harwood of Brookland, his brother-in-law John Yealding of Battle, Sussex, and Thomas Tookey, Nathaniel Rayner, William Elderton, Robert Bladen and Thomas Allen – all of Brenzatt³ – and against William Lamb,⁴ Brookland’s bailiff and JP, began poorly.⁵ The bill was vague, alleging unlawful assembly, assaults, misdemeanours and outrages committed at Grigsby’s house by seven yeomen against four women on a Sunday after evening prayer in October 1598. Few specifics were given. The alleged crimes lacked conviction in their telling, and not all of the names were spelled correctly.⁶ Coke struck first at Lamb, who was also the first to answer, for his failure to prosecute. Lamb held that Agnes Horn did not allege rape or attempted rape, nor any serious injuries. He called her a ‘runagate’ and maintained that the problem was her master who often allowed young men to resort to his house, drink their fill and show what contemporaries observed as ‘tricks of youth’. In a preliminary examination of the house, he made no attempt to examine the men. Riding to Snargate to investigate Mr Grigsby, Lamb learned that he had left town. So too had most of the other defendants, whose being beyond his jurisdiction allowed him to end his work. Later, he admitted that he may have erred in not pursuing the matter, pleading ignorance in law and begging forgiveness. He closed with the comment that hopefully his neighbours, and the country, would think well of him.

Lamb gave his deposition just four days after his answer, where he offered little additional information to the range of questions which were designed to pursue his handling of the matter and his possible culpability. He said that he did not know Agnes’s name, and that the ‘misdeeds’ were ‘lewd parts’ which the young men ‘played’ with her. The worst, he said, was when one of them put a stick up her dress and others ‘shouldered’ her down the stairs. Because her complaint was uncertain and informal, he did not bind over the accused and told her to make no formal accusations as the men had played such tricks there before.⁷

In their answers of 26 May to 8 June 1600, the defendants to the main charges denied all. Their joint answer was vague, made no factual statements and gave nothing away for their later defences.⁸ With a bill nineteen months after the event lacking specifics, and defendants who denied all charges, it is equally surprising that a set of interrogatories and depositions exist which are dated nearly another year later, from 30 January to 8 June 1601.⁹

A detailed description of the facts of the night was not put into writing until the deposition of Agnes Horn and Mrs Joan Grigsby several months after the defendants’ answers, on 30 January 1601, by two local preachers, Henry Stafford of New Romney and Nicholas Gear of Snargate. Their accumulative evidence was gruesome and contested Lamb’s deposition. They deposed that the seven men came to the house after evening prayer, between about 5:00pm and 6:00pm, to eat the venison pasties they brought with them with beer and bread. The men took a room in the loft and shouted for beer. When Agnes, aged thirty-five, came up, Tookey threw her on Yealding’s lap and then pulled up her clothes. Rayner hit her on the thigh with his stick and threatened to have her, but she escaped. They then took to shouting and stomping on the floor, which caused dust to fill the rooms below and the noise to bother neighbours. Joan Grigsby, aged thirty, begged Agnes to go up again; at first, Agnes refused, but then agreed. As soon as she went up, Yealding grabbed her and threw her on Rayner’s lap, who thrust a stick under her clothes and then threw her down the stairs, causing great injuries.

At one point Mary Gamby, aged fourteen, went up and was thrown on the bed by Yealding and Tookey, who laid on her and made a ‘great mess’. She cried for help, bringing up Joan with her baby who ordered them to leave. They said they would not leave as they were bent on sex. While this was occurring, other men downstairs left the house. (Mr Grigsby had left sometime earlier.) Then Harwood came down and told Agnes, who was in the parlour, not to refuse them because as men of property they would make amends ‘for any doings’. He then tried to rape her, and left her for Tookey, who came in and closed the door. Rebuffed, he went into the buttery, where Joan was with her baby, and pushed up against her for the same. Joan grabbed a knife on the table behind her and threatened to put it through him. When Agnes heard Joan’s and the baby’s cries, she tried to go into the buttery, but was grabbed by Harwood. When Agnes said that she would go to the minister to make a complaint, Yealding responded that he should have the priest’s wife as well as her. He then tried to rape Joan’s sister Elizabeth.

At this point, about 8:00pm, Harwood blew out the candles, stamping the fire and causing the embers to spread, almost burning the house down before buckets of water were thrown on the cinders. When Joan confronted him for his actions, he threw her on the ground and plucked out the hairs from her ‘privities’. They offered forcible violence upon the maids, who fled into a chamber and locked the doors. The men broke through and attempted to ravish the maids by force but failed by their resistance. Mrs Grigsby was attacked when she had a child in her arms which she had taken from the cradle to succour. Mary Gamby was left in dire straits, assaulted by three men who left her for dead. When the men could not have their way with Agnes Horn, they beat her about the body with a cudgel and a staff three feet long. She was hurt so badly that she would become permanently lame. Finally, the men left around 11:00pm.

Later that night, Agnes went to minister Gear’s house intending to make a complaint. But Yealding followed her on his horse and threw her on the ground. In her words, he held a hand over her mouth and ‘set upon me most unseemly, and with great violence pinched me about those parts of the body (which are not to be mentioned) with such considerable pain that fire seemed to splash out of my eyes’.¹⁰ The next morning Agnes went to the two parish ministers, Stafford and Gear, who told her to make an official complaint to the Romney Marsh parish JP William Lamb. She went that morning to Lamb’s house and related her story. Lamb shunned her, referring to her inferior social background, and tried to put the blame on Mrs Grigsby for allowing such disorders in her house. He told Agnes that the assault was ‘but a trick of youth’. Then he investigated the other women individually, who declined to make specific accusations. Meanwhile, it was reported that the men had left the area for ‘vacations’ and fled into France.

More than six months after the event, on the morning of Easter Day (8 April 1599), a little before morning service, Rayner went to the house of Henry Stafford, minister of New Romney, saying that he would attend the service and receive communion. Stafford, having heard of his outrages and misdemeanours, told him not to come because he had to confer with him further. When Rayner pressed him as to why he was not allowed to take communion, Stafford replied, in front of several witnesses, that it was because of the rape in Snargate. Rayner then brought an action upon the case in the court of Queen’s Bench for speaking such words, requesting damages of £200 and putting Stafford to charges for his defence.¹¹ He also threatened the minister, saying that if he spoke anything of his alleged offences, he (Rayner) had chased a priest already and would have Stafford as well.¹²

The six defendants and ten character witnesses, from the neighbouring parishes of Brenzatt, Snargate, New Romney, Dymchurch and Hythe, all described as yeomen, deposed on 30 May 1600 that no threats, disorders, outrages or rapes had occurred. Their statements, however, were full of inconsistencies, and Coke directed his examinations on 8 June 1600 to the four men who were the principal actors – Tookey, Rayner, Harwood and Bladen. Coke wanted specifics from each man: who got them together, when they arrived at the house, in which rooms they met whom, what happened when and where, and when they left. Their replies were not well orchestrated. Their departure time ranged from 8:00pm to 10:00pm, while all the women and neighbours agreed on 10:00pm to 11:00pm, and closer to 11:00pm. But several other matters incriminated the defendants. Lamb, the JP who deposed four days after his pleading and before any of the other defendants pleaded, said the women did not tell him the full story originally, and lacking knowledge of law he did not know what to do. Allen, a sub-bailiff and one of the last men to depose, was found to have been Lamb’s servant at the time of the assaults, but soon afterward left his employment.

The fact that Coke did not attempt to examine any of the women at this time suggests that he may have been looking for what we might call a ‘smoking gun’ on which to hang a successful prosecution. Somehow, he had to find a way to end the community’s silence. The men denied attempting the chastity of the women, of closeting themselves with any of them or causing any violence. But they were good friends, all living within three miles of each other and of Snargate.¹³ Allen had organized the meeting at Brenzatt Wall just after evening prayer with news that Elderton had a venison pasty for them and they needed drink – hence a short journey to Grigsby’s house at Snargate. Their accounts of who was where and when, and who did what to whom, all differed. Apart from those differences, Harwood and Bladen said they went out to see an affray at Arrowhead, a mile away, from 5:30pm to 7:00pm. Allen, who deposed six days later, identified Elderton as the ringleader and said that Yealding was armed. He denied the allegations of Agnes, that Mary Gamby was there or that any complaint was made to Lamb. Obviously he had been coached to lessen whatever damage the others did to themselves in their depositions.

Mary Gamby had died in August or September 1599 – possibly from the lingering effects of the assault – and in October, Stafford and the puritan lawyer and mayor John Ming¹⁴ of New Romney conducted their own investigation of the women and Grigsby’s neighbours. Their action was prompted by Stafford’s hearing of Agnes’s permanent incapacity from his own personal examination of a witness who had accompanied Rayner to visit her at Southwark. There is a mention in the proceedings of a bill in the ecclesiastical court to try the offenders, but the bill has not been found in the records at Canterbury.¹⁵ Since Stafford and his colleague Gear were puritan preachers dedicated to the moral and spiritual reformation of the parish, they may have tried to proceed against the culprits in the ecclesiastical court because of the wall of silence that had been established among the older ruling families. A suspicion is that Stafford, having failed in this task, forwarded his and Ming’s information to Coke, a known supporter of moderate puritans in these years as well as a known opponent of violent youths. This may help to explain why Coke brought his bill in May 1600 after conducting his own investigation. He had a public reputation at that time for securing punishment for violent offenders.

Lamb’s confession to the fact that these events may have occurred and that he may have erred gave Coke the opportunity to pursue an interrogation of the parties under oath. There was, however, an eight-month delay in the preparation of the interrogatories. The delay might have arisen from the attorney general’s heavy workload on national affairs. It may have been due to a statement by Joan Grigsby that no harm was done (to protect her husband’s house and her employment of victualling), the subsequent disappearance of her husband John or a separate investigation by the new mayor of New Romney – the conservative William Thurbarne – and jurat Robert Oakman. Internal evidence states that Thurbarne and Oakman examined the three young women and concluded that no abuses were committed.¹⁶ Therefore, the door for prosecutions may have appeared to be closed.

That Coke proceeded to the final stage was due perhaps to his learning that Rayner had visited Agnes in Southwark in December 1600, where she was living incapacitated, and paid her 20s for her fall, along with another 20s at a later visit. This information was given away by one of the witnesses for the defendants, John Godderd of New Romney, aged twenty-four. Thus the stage was set for Agnes’s depositions of 30 January 1601, which formal evidence led to the interrogatories drawn for the other parties on 20 February. The prosecution and the defence each called thirteen witnesses. The depositions for the defence were virtually useless with their vague testimony, while the depositions of parties and witnesses for the prosecution read like modern documentary evidence. The case files ended there.

The two puritan ministers who had approached Coke were in the process of creating a New Jerusalem for this marginal marsh society. The records of the borough courts of New Romney and Romney Marsh are replete with prosecutions against drunkenness, lewd speech, disorders and offences against morals.¹⁷ Perhaps the events on the night of 6 October 1598 at Snargate were seen as a lightning rod for action – one to mobilize the community to recognize the evils of its ways and call for God’s judgement against what their local lawyer and historian William Lambarde called ‘the evil doers’ who lead society into the abyss. For once, a few lay and spiritual leaders of the marsh were willing to go beyond their borders, to call upon the most fearsome institution of the central state and one of its most outstanding legal practitioners, to make an example of these wild youths of prominent local social status who defiled women and threatened the advent of a new world order.

The Star Chamber judgements in these years have not weathered the passage of time. But the Fine Rolls of the Exchequer reveal that on 25 February 1602, nearly a year after the last depositions in this case, six of the defendants were fined.¹⁸ Elderton, who was not identified with any of the actions, and Yealding, who escaped into Yorkshire and was not found, did not provide answers to the bill and were not interrogated. But Lamb and Allen were fined £40 each, a sizeable sum given that a family of five in the area lived on wages of £9 12s a year. The real hammer, however, fell on Harwood, Rayner, Tookey and Bladen, who were fined £200 each. Since the average yeoman of the area was worth a net £160, in essence they were made bankrupts. The hefty fines were due in part not only to Coke’s vigilance, but also to Lord Keeper Sir Thomas Egerton’s aphorism that great malefactors should pay the greatest amounts.¹⁹ In addition to the fine, the convicted were also charged to pay the costs and fees of the court, ‘and so it was ordered’.²⁰

***

The men were not without their pasts. In the month prior to their attacks, Nathaniel Rayner was indicted for assaulting Clement Ellesmore, a petty chapman of Maidstone, at Warehorne on 21 September 1598.²¹ There is no record of its outcome. Harwood was indicted for a trespass on the case later in April 1602.²² He did not appear and was in mercy three times for non-appearances. Eight months later on 13 December he came to an agreement with the plaintiff.²³ But before that case was resolved he was indicted for another trespass on the case on 29 November, was in mercy twice for non-appearance, and came to an agreement on the same day as the previous prosecution.²⁴ That summer he was on a coroner’s inquest for the killing of a man and was a surety for a glover prosecuted for slanderous words. He appeared no more in the extant local court records of the day until a gaol calendar entry of 19 March 1610, in which he was listed as a prisoner in Canterbury gaol, where he later died.²⁵

One of the puritan ministers was not without his foibles either. Henry Stafford’s servant Anthony Rhodes was accused of fathering the child of a servant, Elizabeth Bingham, aged twenty-three, on Sunday, 22 September or 6 October 1601, in a field behind a barn of mayor John Thurbarne.²⁶ She deposed that she had a ring and other things from Rhodes in her custody. He was accused of ‘going to the Devil’ with Mr Stafford, but Stafford put things right. Rhodes was convicted and ordered to pay the town overseers 12d weekly until the child reached age eighteen.²⁷ Stafford was also involved in pleas of trespass upon the case in 1602.²⁸ His servants continued their misdemeanours, as John Reke and William Wind were accused of stealing a turkey and five hens in the spring of 1602.²⁹ With regard to Nicholas Gear, he does not appear in any of the court records of the county.

Whatever the failings of Stafford’s own household, he and Gear had been able to interest the attorney general in taking on the case not just on behalf of the formidable Agnes Horn but also on behalf of the godly cause of reform. Coke, the attorney general who was soon to become chief justice of the Common Pleas, had made his point, and the ministers of God had a precedent with which to work their transformation of this marginal marsh society. By the English civil wars of the 1640s, Romney Marsh was thoroughly puritan and in the vanguard of the revolution that brought down King and Court.

It is interesting that Stafford and Gear brought to Coke allegations of disorder centred on rape when it was a crime denounced in the abstract but not much prosecuted in practice. According to major legal writers such as Sir Anthony Fitzherbert, in law the crime of rape was considered as the most heinous after that of murder.³⁰ Other law writers such as Lambarde, Michael Dalton and Sir Henry Finch gave it little discussion, however. Ferdinando Pulton’s authoritative 1609 treatise on crime and the criminal law considered an assault as rape only if the woman did not become pregnant, and then it was important to have evidence distinguishing it from ravishment.³¹ Coke himself, writing later in his Commentaries, defined rape as ‘unlawful carnal Knowledge and abuse’ against a woman’s will, citing clauses from Westminster I and II and statutes from Henry VI through Edward VI. Evidence of penetration and semen were crucial, and Coke closed with a ‘holy history’ of this heinous crime.³²

The crime was in the public eye as it was well represented in the theatre through the plays of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Middleton and William Shakespeare. Puritans in particular spoke and wrote vehemently against rape among all sexual crimes. But few cases of rape or attempted rape were prosecuted, either in the ecclesiastical courts or the common-law assizes, and fewer succeeded. Some prosecutions focused on ‘assault’, not ‘rape’. According to Cynthia Herrup, the reaction of the offenders in the Snargate case was typical: most such perpetrators fled the scene, and the difficulty at trial was providing credible witnesses as well as uncontroverted facts.³³ Few depositions were ever taken, and few women were willing to speak afterwards of their ordeals. M. Chayter has argued that depositions in rape cases for the Northern Circuit were dictated by the JPs, thus challenging the victims’ original voices.³⁴ But there appears to be no such suggestion for Coke’s deponents in the Star Chamber where, presumably, we have a higher standard of evidence. Even in politically charged cases of riot, the voices of local inhabitants in Star Chamber materials were strong.

Bernard Capp provides several general insights into neighbourhood dynamics that are pertinent. First, local communities often witnessed disputes between young women and men of the propertied class, and churchwardens often complained of unruly behaviour committed by young men. Such complaints were often brought before the ecclesiastical consistory courts, where they usually expired due to the non-appearance of parties and witnesses, in spite of a crusade in Kent against immoral and sexual behaviour by the Archdeacon of Canterbury. Second, courts in metropolitan London were quick to protect maids who had been abused by their masters or customers. Finally, husbands who found their wives raped would often seek immediate vengeance upon the culprit.³⁵

The age of victims mattered, too. According to Martin Ingram, the sexual exploitation of children to the marriage age of twelve, and for youngsters aged twelve to fifteen, was considered ‘abuse’ by contemporaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but as with sexual assaults more generally, only a fraction of such cases came to the authorities. The age of consent for marriage was twelve, though the 1576 act (18 Eliz. I c.7) made carnal knowledge of any child under ten rape regardless of ‘consent’, as well as refusing the plea of clergy for all such perpetrators. Ingram also cites evidence that there were no explicit cases in Essex church courts from 1560–1680, though some in London’s Bridewell, and that ravishing a girl aged seven brought an acquittal because she was considered too young to have been so molested, but not at age nine.³⁶ Garthine Walker’s examination of the depictions of rapists as ‘everyman’ or as ‘monsters’ makes several observations on their motives and methods, ranging from importunity and harassment to lust and sweet-talking their young female victims. Sexual harassment and coercion were routine aspects of daily life, and such routine forms were seldom if ever prosecuted. It was the act of violence and bodily harm that might bring such matters to the courts, and here is where the ‘monster’ appeared.³⁷ There is, however, no such rhetoric in the descriptions of the rapes at Snargate – rather, drunken male lust and disorder that required a message to be sent into this local community.

Table 4.1. Victims of alleged rape in the home county assizes, 1558–16251.

Source: Works cited in note 38.

Notes:

1 The first numbers are cases, the second number following the dash are persons slated for execution. For simplicity, not guilty, clergy, remanded and at large conclusions are not segregated here, and ‘slated for execution’ means a verdict to hang without information on that outcome.

2 Children are aged 12 and under; no other ages are given for victims named ‘children’.

3 Teens include daughters who are not listed as children.

4 ‘Women Unspecified’ includes for Elizabeth’s reign three servants of Essex (accused deemed not guilty) and one of Sussex, for which the accused was found guilty and hanged.

The extant assize court records from the reign of Elizabeth I through that of Charles II also provide instructive context. As most prosecutions for rape as such were tried at the common law at the county assizes, we can examine those for the Home Counties in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I from the prodigious calendar of assize records produced for those counties by the late Professor James Cockburn.³⁸ The results of those cases are presented in the table above.³⁹

Of the 119 cases, eighty-nine come from Elizabeth’s reign and thirty from James’s. What is striking is that about 40% of the cases are of children aged two to twelve, and in only nine of those cases (19%) did the culprit face hanging. Overall, excluding children, the rate of men sentenced to hang was 25%. While the annual number of child cases did not change from one reign to the other, the hanging sentence rate for all cases changed from 20% in Elizabeth’s reign to 30% in James’s, but in children’s cases from 12.5% to 33%. The latter figures suggest that sentencing for such cases increased significantly in the reign of James. Whether these cases were rape, ravishment or sexual molestation is unclear; it is difficult to explain such a sharp increase in sentencing.

Several cases in the Home County assize records address some of the issues that shaped prosecutions. While a wife was considered something akin to the property of her husband, one case suggests that a similar view prevailed for men and their lovers, as John Davey, shoemaker, raped his ‘mistress’ Agnes Wood and was found not guilty.⁴⁰ Incestuous attacks differed: Edmund Hammond, yeoman, raped his daughter Anne, aged eighteen, and was sentenced to hang.⁴¹ Evidence does not appear to be a factor in all cases. For example, Nicholas Nicholas, shoemaker, assaulted Elizabeth, wife of Thomas Riffe, with a bearing-bill and a dagger; her husband Thomas, a weaver, and Richard Baker, a husbandman, gave evidence but Nicholas was found not guilty.⁴² When John Vivvars, labourer, was charged with raping Catherine Belgrave, aged ten, three men (two farmers and a baker) gave recognizances to give evidence on behalf of their wives, along with Catherine’s father (a farmer), mother and herself, but he was found not guilty.⁴³ One could also avoid prosecution: Edward Sharp, brewer, charged with raping Elizabeth Withers, aged nine, on 1 November 1580, stood mute and was sentenced to the ancient sanction of peine forte et dure.⁴⁴

But prosecution was still feared. That factored into the dread of being summoned for a rape as witnessed by Anthony Cass, labourer, who in a coroner’s inquest was found guilty of murdering Judith Smith, a servant girl, out of fear she would reveal that he had ‘ravished’ her; he took her into a field, broke her neck and threw her into a pond.⁴⁵ Sometimes a murder investigation also revealed a previous rape that had not resulted in charges, as in Richard ap Bevan, petty chapman, who appeared before a coroner’s inquest for the murder of Agnes New, aged six; he raped her on 17 November 1599 and she ‘lingered’ and died of the injuries on 17 March 1600.⁴⁶ Sentencing was not always according to the criminal law, as judges often used their discretion. For example, Gerson Gerard, labourer, was found not guilty on charges that he had raped a woman aged twenty, but was sent to the House of Correction for a month.⁴⁷ John King, yeoman, charged with raping Joan Taylor, aged five, was found not guilty but bound over for good behaviour.⁴⁸

Several offenders were charged with multiple rapes. Henry Walker of Southwark, joiner, was charged with assaulting Mary More, aged six, daughter of a joiner’s family, on 28 August 1611, and Gartred Wastall, aged five, daughter of a similar family of Southwark, on 30 August 1611, but found not guilty of both.⁴⁹ Richard Jackson, husbandman, raped Mary Goodlad, aged ten, Rachel Bonner and Liddia Duke, both aged eleven, on 2 February 1619, and then raped Elizabeth Dagnett, aged twelve, on 10 January 1620; prosecuted at the time of the last assault, he was convicted and hanged.⁵⁰ A more complex scenario was that of John Rich, miner, accused of raping his servants Elizabeth Harris on 26 June 1566 and Catherine Burrell on 10 June 1567; tried for the latter, he was found guilty and hanged. John Smith, another miner at Ashburnham, was accused of raping Catherine, who was Smith’s servant, on 10 June 1567, but found not guilty.⁵¹

In Kent, there is the case of John Henshaw of Deptford, tailor, who allegedly raped Elizabeth Rowson, aged eight, on 3 February 1583; Alice Keeling, aged six, on 28 August 1584 at the house of Richard Halpeny; and then Agnes Keeling, aged seven, in the same house on 28 August 1584; he was found not guilty on all counts.⁵² Prosecutions of rape in Kent continued, albeit at a slower pace, in the succeeding sixty years. The assize records for 1625–85 document thirteen cases in the reign of Charles I (0.5 yearly), twelve in the Interregnum (1.0 yearly), and nineteen in the reign of Charles II (0.76 yearly). Clearly the prosecutions increased between 1650 and 1685, while the number of prosecutions for assaults on children declined dramatically. Instead, most of the alleged victims were wives, spinsters and widows. A major change occurred with regard to outcomes. In Elizabeth’s reign no accusations were thrown out by grand juries as ignoramus or unfit for trial. Most of the accused were deemed to be at large (78%). Things changed in the Interregnum, when seven accusations were found ignoramus and four of the accused not guilty, and in the reign of Charles II twelve were found ignoramus and only three not guilty. Obviously grand juries preferred to make no finding rather than to send these accusations to trial, which suggests a view to ignore them.⁵³

Generally, then, rape was not much prosecuted. But turning to the socio-economic and religious background in Kent and the adjoining Home Counties around the time of the Snargate assaults provides context for the unusual decision to pursue this case with rigour and in Star Chamber.⁵⁴ The year 1597 brought a plague to the region, where a major decline in the cloth industry led to an unstable economy and a fall in property values. It also contributed to a rise of religious non-conformity in rural country parishes.⁵⁵ The region had been a breeding ground of Lollards from the 1420s, later supporting ‘sacramentarianism’ and its vernacular heresy in the 1550s; many Marian exiles hid in the marshes of Kent; and John Foxe’s files reveal inhabitants who denied Christ’s divinity and the doctrine of the Trinity.⁵⁶ It was considered a ‘sickly and contagious country’ because of its marsh fog or ‘vapors’ that made it a ‘sink hole’, had a population that comprised about ten persons and hundreds of sheep per square mile.⁵⁷

The view of Patrick Collinson is instructive: this was an expanding community of sin where puritans were accelerating their work.⁵⁸ While towns such as New Romney and Rye were puritan by the 1590s, the classis movement in the Church was promoting puritan ministers in rural parishes and even a printer – John Stroud at Smarden. Puritan efforts extended into the realm of education and the schools, where Thomas Good of Cranbrook taught a reformed church. A flurry of non-traditional forenames such as Comfort, Faintnot, Freegift, Mercy and Wellabroad began to fill the parish registers. Such activities mirrored the scene in Coke’s homeland, and he must have seen the resemblance.

A remaining question is: where does Coke fit into this mosaic? For background, he spent much of his twenties and thirties as a lawyer in defending puritans and puritan sympathizers in slander cases – many of which he lost through technicalities.⁵⁹ Afterwards, he did the same as a crown prosecutor riding the Norfolk assize circuit on horseback from 1576 through 1602, and as recorder of Norwich and London from 1591, where he was the judge of its criminal courts of oyer and terminer and gaol delivery.⁶⁰ As attorney general in the late 1590s, he led vigorous prosecutions of Catholics such as Dr Lopez and Edward Squire, and the Jesuits John Gerard and Henry Walpole. He also staked out a corner of Gray’s Inn Fields to trap Italian courtiers who served the Roman Catholic establishment. His prosecutorial energy continued in the Star Chamber, where, as attorney general between 1584 and 1606, he preferred more cases than any other Elizabethan official.⁶¹

Coke was also a man of religion and emotion. He was the eldest of ten children, of whom eight were female. Most of his sisters became puritans or separatists, including his favourite sister Ann. Ann married the puritan Francis Stubbs, a college friend of Coke, whose sister married the puritan Thomas Cartwright. A light of Coke’s life, his sister Ann raised puritan children, catechized her servants and sponsored Calvinist preachers. She viewed the Scriptures not as men’s words but as tongues from the heart.⁶² Coke went to Trinity College, Cambridge with Thomas Cartwright, who preached hotly on the primitive Church and whom he befriended. Coke’s law chambers at the Inner Temple were those of the earl of Leicester, and many of his clients were puritans of East Anglia.

Coke was outwardly conventional in matters of religion and a defender of the Anglican Church as he dedicated his life to serving God and continuing the reformation of the established Church.⁶³ Privately, his sister and cousins married into puritan households, and the ministers he patronized and placed into Church livings wore no surplices, omitted ceremonies and taught Protestant theology in unlicensed schools. He attracted sermons from ‘Godly divines’ who characterized him as one of the ‘Elect’. Thus he railed against priests, spoke well of Lollards, found church livings for the children of relatives and instructed his children on the sins of bribery, simony, usury and avoidance of physical excesses. He held such views emotionally, wept when honoured, and was seen weeping when sentencing criminals to death and crying at executions.⁶⁴ Therefore, he took his religion and emotions seriously, which also may account for his long delays at Star Chamber proceedings when he was examining the earl of Essex and the men in his revolt.

Professionally, Coke’s litigation of cases was known as plodding. A man who began work at 3:00am, he was pedantic, would leave no stone unturned and would not be rushed by the press of time. This may explain why there was so much time in between his moves in prosecuting this rape case. But when it came down to the evidence, his examinations of the culprits and witnesses were seldom matched in the court’s proceedings. The strength of his work was all the more impressive as he was very short-sighted by 1602, and most of his reading and writing had to be done in daylight or by candle. He would maintain this prodigious workload for another thirty-odd years, which is a testament to his fortitude.

That Coke would listen to the appeals of two puritan ministers in the marshlands of Kent and work their case into his busy schedule for the state is thus not as surprising as it first seems. He was noted for his zeal against troublesome youth and a hatred of physical violence. In Henry Stafford he had an ally with similar goals – the reformation of the Church and stamping out the activities of violent youths. Stafford was becoming a landowner, and by 1606 owned marshland in Romney and was the clerk and vicar of the town and port of New Romney, which had become a puritan centre of the region.⁶⁵ He was also noted as the town clerk.⁶⁶ There was an environmental connection, too. The administrative hundred where Coke began his landed empire in the marshy region of central Norfolk, raising sheep and cattle for the London market, was not dissimilar.

In conclusion, there are a number of threads which can be woven to reveal how this future chief justice of England stepped into Romney Marsh, a region defined by contemporary observers as ‘Evill in Winter, grievous in Sommer, and never good’, in the midst of high affairs of state, to place his standard on the behaviour of aspiring young men of local landed society, behaviour of a sort not often prosecuted in the regular criminal courts. With several privy councillors sitting as judges in Star Chamber, they could not but be impressed by the work Coke had undertaken and the slew of effective evidence he presented, which left no room for anything but heavy sentences.

While Coke would go on to become a lynchpin for the future of the common law,⁶⁷ in this case he sent a stirring message to the people of Romney Marsh via his efforts in Star Chamber. The courts of early modern England were a matrix of jurisdictions, often overlapping. This multiplicity allowed prosecutions of actions in more than one court, with people who found themselves unable to get justice in one court free to turn to another. The value of Star Chamber was that it allowed prosecutions of amorphously defined wrongs; in this instance, a brutal case of multiple sexual assaults that could at least be tried as violent disorder, pushed forward by puritan reformers and the ally they found in Coke. Star Chamber’s value laid in part in that court’s broad power to enforce its investigatory processes and to make extensive use of written examinations for testimony – testimony that would be preserved for posterity. Because of that fact, our study of its history enables us to respond to Frederick William Maitland’s plea to discover ‘The Shallows and Silences of Real Life’.⁶⁸